Hydroman52 wrote:
Hey Michele,
Good post. It will be interesting to see what you finally decide to use as your primary pick. When I rediscovered the guitar a few years back, I started using the celluloid medium picks by different manufacturers, but they kept on breaking on me. As I moved up to heavier ones, they still broke, only more dramatically. It got to the point where a person would be well advised to use safety goggles while around me (maybe I just got some bad batches). Then I moved over to the Dunlop Tortex (solved the breakage problem) and began to move up in thickness. I started at the .88 (green I think) and moved up to the 1.0 (blue), and now I'm at the 1.14 (purple). I wanted to move to the thickest that I could find, but it was too awkward managing that large of a step. So, the strategy was to buy a small bag of picks, use them up (wear out, give away, or lose them), and then move up to a thicker one. It seems to be the right amount of time to go thicker and I have not regretted any of the moves, yet.
I have heard many times to go with medium strings and the heaviest pick you can handle to cut through other instruments in an acoustic environment or when acoustic and electric meet. As you electrify your acoustic, that probably becomes less of an issue. I believe that you can always back off with the heavier stuff, but it probably isn't a good idea to lean too hard on the light gear. I'd be interested in an update to this thread when you get things figured out. I hope to try the move up again when I do in the last of the purple picks (within a year or so). Purple is not my favorite color, but I'm getting used to it . . . . . blue is much better for me. However, I'd much rather sound good than look good, and many of my friends have said that's true (not sure how I should take that).
Hydroman52
Thanks Hydroman. I found your advice really useful. I find the heavier ones are more responsive and I feel like I have more control. I also find that the lighter ones produce way too much pick noise, which i find really annoying.
I must say though that the heavy duralin and tortex ones, while feeling really nice and being smooooooth to play with, do tend to suck the sound out of the string. It feels like they dampen the string somehow. I find this with the x-heavy 1.5 mm Planet Waves duralin one especially. Maybe Wrench or another sound-engineer/expert can explain it. Hmm... maybe I'm just imagining things. I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else finds this.
thanks
M.